Highland Fling - A Funny Chick Lit Romance (COMPLETE)

Tantrums, Tears and Outrageous Plans

       Today's 'to-do' list included 1) Stop Fancying Unavailable Men and 2) Throw Yourself Into Your New Job.

If only Jack hadn't sent me a text the morning after our night out. "Enjoyed sharing a pizza with you. Gotta love a greedy girl. Have a nice weekend." He'd added emojis after the greedy girl bit in case I took offence and I decided not to. I wished he hadn't put the 'love' in there. The logical bit of me tells me that taken in context the word means nothing. The illogical bit, and often I wonder if I'm far more governed by weirdness than most, screams he loves me, loves me!

Kirsty phoned on Sunday and asked if I'd spoken with Jack. She sounded tearful, and the sound of her choking back tears as she reiterated how dreadful the split with Jack had been guilt-tripped me into telling her about Big Donnie's offer for the painting.

"And he said no!" The cheerfulness level cranked up one hundred percent on one side of the conversation and plummeted by the same on the other. "Goodness me! He was always telling me that five grand would help him enormously with the marketing of the tours."

I concentrate on throwing myself into the new job. On Saturday, Dexter sent me an email asking if he could meet me in Ardlui on Monday morning. He was there doing a four-day mindfulness and yoga retreat, so if I could drive there we could discuss the design work I'm doing for Blissful Beauty in detail. Not much of a retreat, I thought, if you're sneaking out to send work emails. But Ardlui is only a fifty minute drive from Lochalshie, so much easier to get to than Glasgow. And meet-ups with our biggest client were Melissa's number one reason for letting me work away from the office.

Relaxed Dexter, I decide when I meet him later, has a hypnotic trance-like state to him I find slightly terrifying. Ardlui sits at the top of Loch Lomond and there is not much to it, apart from a few houses and a lot of wooden lodges that nestle behind lush green trees. I dump my car in the park outside the reception. The woman at the desk directs me to chalet number four, which happens to be the biggest one in the place—three floors, a porch big enough to hold a table for ten and chairs, and a garage. It's here that Zen-like Dexter greets me.

"Gaby!" he says, the exuberance dialled down three or four twists. He plants his hands in prayer position and bows. I do the same back and then hate myself. I am an idiot.

"Come in, come in!" he waves me through the door. "We have so much to discuss."

"How was your retreat?" I ask. He looks the part—dressed in baggy linen trousers and a loose white tee shirt, no shoes and his hair tied back in a ponytail at the crown of his head. Thankfully, his bare feet hold no horrors such as dirty toenails, freakishly long toes or hobbit hairiness. When I plonk myself on the armchair in the chalet's living room, he drops to the floor and crosses his legs into the lotus position. Show-off.

"Beyond awesome, Gaby. And what I needed. Modern life is stressful. You need to come on these weekends so you can appreciate life at a much slower pace, do you know what I mean?"

I nod, and he pulls his laptop towards him, fires it up and glares at it, his expression performing an 180-degree turn from placid to furious in a second. The next few words are not Zen. Quite the opposite in fact and not repeatable. The gist of it is he is sick and tired of the backwardness of Scotland and the inability to get decent Wi-Fi anywhere outside the central belt. I pull out the print-outs of my designs I had the foresight to bring with me and talk through the changes I've made in what I hope are soothing tones.

The changes, just as has been the case with all the changes I've made so far, involve one tiny tweak here, one miniscule tweak there, and make the pages closer than ever to the original designs I presented Dexter with. It's a mark of his distraction that he only glances at them and when he does, says "Fine, fine." I heave a sigh of relief. If I'd had to change them yet again, I might have added to the blue turn to the air myself and that wouldn't have been professional.